See also US Counterterror Adviser to Obama

(John Brennan)

Defends Jihad as “Legitimate Tenet of Islam”

From U.S.

the ABC’s of Jihad

Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts

By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.

Last month, a U.S. foreign aid official said, workers launched a “scrubbing” operation in neighboring Pakistan to purge from the books all references to rifles and killing. Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.

The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books “are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy.” Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.

Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID “will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries.”

The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach “respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.

AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.

“It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,” Stratos said. “But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.”

Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID’s former director established that taxpayers’ funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has “not a legal leg to stand on” in distributing the books.

“Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious,” she said.

Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.

During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders.

“I think we were perfectly happy to see these books trashing the Soviet Union,” said Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID’s Central Asia Task Force.

AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.

Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers.

“The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse,” said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator who is a program coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, a Pakistan-based nonprofit.

An aid worker in the region reviewed an unrevised 100-page book and counted 43 pages containing violent images or passages.

The military content was included to “stimulate resistance against invasion,” explained Yaquib Roshan of Nebraska’s Afghanistan center. “Even in January, the books were absolutely the same . . . pictures of bullets and Kalashnikovs and you name it.”

During the Taliban era, censors purged human images from the books. One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier’s head is missing.

Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.

“We were quite shocked,” said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. “The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it.”

After the United States launched a military campaign last year, the United Nations’ education agency, UNICEF, began preparing to reopen Afghanistan’s schools, using new books developed with 70 Afghan educators and 24 private aid groups. In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.

Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF’s new texts could be used only as supplements.

Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.

About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as “civics” courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and “how to be a good Muslim.”

UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old “militarized” books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.

On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.

“We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum,” he said

Schoolbooks into Afghanistan…for 20 Years?

And why is President Bush hiding it?

By Jared Israel [Posted 9 April 2002]

Or perhaps I should say, “Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that’s waiting to happen?”

Because it has been almost unreported in the Western media that the US government shipped, and continues to ship, millions of Islamist (or Islamic fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan.

Only one English-speaking newspaper we could find has investigated this issue: the Washington Post. The story appeared March 23rd. [1]

Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…”
– Washington Post, 23 March 2002
See footnote [1]

According to the Post the U.S. is now “…wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism.”

So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks “steeped a generation in [Islamist] violence.”

How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?

=============

Let’s be reasonable

=============

Nobody with normal intelligence could expect to distribute millions of violent Islamist schoolbooks without influencing school children towards violent Islamism. Therefore one would assume that the unnamed US officials who, we are told, are distressed at these “unintended consequences” must previously have been unaware of the Islamist content of the schoolbooks.

But surely someone was aware. The US government can’t write, edit, print and ship millions of violent, Muslim fundamentalist primers into Afghanistan without high officials in the US government approving those primers.

So if the books weren’t supposed to be Islamist, that is if their fanatical content contradicted US policy in Afghanistan, shouldn’t the mass media and top politicians, such as President George Bush, now be calling for an investigation? Shouldn’t they be demanding to know the identity of the official or officials who subverted the intended US policy by flooding Afghanistan with jihad primers?

Indeed, considering the disastrous consequences, shouldn’t US officials and the media be questioning the very practice of violating the sovereignty of other countries by distributing millions of Islamic fundamentalist schoolbooks?

Yet using the media search engine, Lexis-Nexis, we could find no evidence that any mainstream Western newspaper, other than the Washington Post, nor any TV station or government leader ever questioned, let alone denounced, the export of millions of Islamist schoolbooks to Afghanistan.

Quite the contrary.

For example here’s what the Boston Globe wrote in an article about the obstacles to education in Afghanistan, a year after the US invasion:

“The obstacles to accomplishing that goal are enormous. What few schools impoverished Afghanistan once had – about 2,000 – are now all virtually destroyed, pummeled by gunfire or turned into refugee camps. Teachers here have not been paid for months, even years. Those schoolbooks that still exist are pro-Taliban screeds and deemed unusable.
– Elizabeth Neuffer in the Boston Globe, March 17, 2002 [2]

The article implies that the unusable textbooks were produced by and for the Taliban – “pro-Taliban screeds.” The author, Elizabeth Neuffer, is the Globe’s UN Bureau Chief. Surely she must know that the textbooks in question were made in USA and that the US is continuing to ship Islamist textbooks into Afghanistan. Instead of exposing the scandal that the US promotes Muslim fanaticism in Afghanistan, she misrepresents the books and misleads her readers.

Other newspapers spun more elaborate lies. Here is the Daily Telegraph from Sydney, Australia:

[Daily Telegraph excerpt starts here]

“AFGHAN children ran, skipped and dawdled to their classrooms like pupils everywhere yesterday for the start of a new school year — with girls and women teachers back in class and subjects like math replacing the Islamic dogma of the Taliban.

“In a symbolic break from a war-scarred past, children opened new textbooks written by Afghan scholars based at universities in the US.

“There are even pictures of people — images banned by the fundamentalist Taliban.”

By beginning the article with the irrelevant but cheery image – “Afghan children ran, skipped and dawdled…[etc].” – the Telegraph prepares us for an upbeat news experience. We are not disappointed. We are told that in the new textbooks:

“There are even pictures of people — images banned by the fundamentalist Taliban.”
– Daily Telegraph See footnote [3]

Again we get the impression that the Taliban were responsible for the bad old texts but due to the US invasion “children opened new textbooks…”.

Unfortunately, as the Washington Post investigators reported:

“Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.” — Washington Post, March 23, 2002

Other than their objections to the human face, the Taliban were perfectly happy with the US-produced primers.

As if presenting evidence of a sea change, the Telegraph tells that now Afghan children have schoolbooks “written by Afghan scholars based at universities in the US.”

Similarly, an article five weeks earlier in the Omaha World-Herald declares that, “Afghanistan stands at least a chance of hauling a modern, healthy society up out of the ashes of war and oppression,” partly because University of Nebraska at Omaha “officials and staffers” will be “cranking up their presses in neighboring Pakistan” to churn out schoolbooks, all funded by “a $ 6.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development [AID].” [4]

Neither newspaper mentions that the bad old schoolbooks “were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies.” — Washington Post, March 23, 2002)

What about the US government? Have any US congressmen demanded an investigation to find out who in the US government was involved in the production of jihad primers that “steeped a generation in [Islamist] violence”?

No they have not.

=====================

Speaking of forked tongues…

=====================

What about George Walker Bush?

You may recall that George and Laura Bush have made passionate speeches denouncing Islamic fundamentalism. At first Mr. Bush told us we needed to attack Afghanistan in order to stop Mr. bin Laden. But later on he and Laura Bush told us we were fighting to crush the vicious fundamentalists.

Has George Bush said anything about the textbooks?

Yes, Mr. Bush talked about the jihad primers in a March 16th radio broadcast. He held nothing back:

“And before the end of the year, we’ll have sent almost 10 million of them [that is, new textbooks] to the children of Afghanistan. These textbooks will teach tolerance and respect for human dignity instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

Note the phrase, “instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

So according to Bush, Afghan school children won’t have to contend with bad schoolbooks anymore because finally the US has taken charge, replacing those other guys, those evil educators who published textbooks “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

The amazing thing is not only that he tells such total lies but that he delivers them with such righteous indignation.

What about the new textbooks? Will they “teach tolerance and respect for human dignity” as Honest George promises?

To be precise (which may be unwise in today’s world) how will the new textbooks that George Bush Junior is shipping into Afghanistan differ from the old ones? You know, those old books that were also designed at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and paid for by the US government agency, AID? You know, those old, un-American books that George Bush Junior attacked for “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry”? Those terrible old books that were shipped into Afghanistan by Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior?

Here’s the Washington Post again:

“On Feb. 4, [Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID’s Central Asia Task Force] arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

– Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So it appears that the only change is that some violent pictures have been removed from the printing plates and some fruit has been added. There is no indication that the texts have been changed.

What does a non-fundamentalist Afghan educator think about the new schoolbooks?

“‘The pictures [in the old schoolbooks] are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse,’ said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator who is a program coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, a Pakistan-based nonprofit.’”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

– Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So the United States government is right now shipping into Afghanistan millions of Islamic Fundamentalist schoolbooks whose texts, according to a non-Fundamentalist Afghan educator, are not just “horrendous,” they are “much worse.”

Is it possible that this is all a terrible mistake? That Mr. Bush and US AID just don’t know what’s in the new schoolbooks?

Apparently not.

According to the Washington Post, the “White House defends the religious content” of the schoolbooks. And as for US AID, the Agency for International Development, which pays for the books:

‘It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,’ Stratos said. ‘But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.’”
– Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So because education is predominantly secular it’s OK for the schoolbooks to be entirely fundamentalist. Likewise, since marriage is predominantly monogamous it’s OK to cheat. And since banks are predominantly places where people deposit money, it’s OK to rob a bank.

Got it?

Mr. Bush describes the texts of the old books as “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” But note, having been republished in the new books, these exact same texts have been reborn. Now they are “religious instruction” (says US AID) and “religious content” (says the White House). It’s a modern miracle.

Reading these news reports and statements one might feel a certain sympathy for citizens of the US and allied countries, required to hold in their minds at one time a) the conviction that Mr. Bush is sincerely fighting Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and b) the knowledge that the US is spending millions of dollars to indoctrinate Afghan school children with Islamic fundamentalism.

Not to worry. This problem has been solved by the US and allied mass media, which, with the exception of the Washington Post, have never told their readers and viewers who it was that produced the old books or what it is that’s in the new ones.

Even the Washington Post has pulled its punches. For example, consider the headline of the March 23rd article, the only one that deals critically with the jihad primers.

Here’s the headline. (Headlines are quite important because with any given article, most people only read the headline.)

“Violent Soviet-Era textbooks.” This phrase doesn’t even make it clear that the books were shipped in by the US government! They could have been hateful Russian books.

And the phrase “Complicate Afghan Education Efforts” sounds like the books are hindering current US attempts at effecting progressive change. Nobody would guess from this headline that US AID has been forcing Islamic fundamentalist texts on Afghan kids for 20 years or that they’re still importing the same texts today, minus the guns and with more fruit.

In the body of the article the Post asserts without evidence that steeping “a generation in [Islamist] violence” was an “unintended consequence” of giving Afghan children violent Islamist schoolbooks.

“Unintended consequence” is fast becoming the US Establishment’s favorite excuse for the many disasters of its foreign policy. “We didn’t know. We weren’t prepared. We used old maps. We didn’t see the train. We thought there were tanks in the refugee column. Who could have expected this to happen?” and on and on.

But does the case of the Islamist textbooks involve unintended consequences? Doesn’t it in fact appear to be deliberate policy?

2) The Boston Globe March 17, 2002, Sunday, Third Edition Focus; Pg. E1 “The Task: Educating A Generation Of Women, And Quickly With A Female Literacy Rate Of Less Than 4 Percent, Teachers Face Obstacles Even With The Taliban Gone” By Elizabeth Neuffer (The Globe’s United Nations Bureau Chief)

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University of Nebraska at Omaha

Center for Afghanistan Studies

Background

The University of Nebraska at Omaha is home to the Center for Afghanistan Studies, which was established in 1972 and is currently the only academic program in the United States exclusively concerned with Afghanistan affairs. It receives almost all of its funding from outside sources; the university pays for several employees’ salaries.

From its start until 1978, UNO participated in an exchange program with Kabul University. But after the 1978 pro-Soviet coup, the Afghanistan programs stopped.

It wasn’t until 1984 that the Center received its first USAID contract to provide educational training programs and facilities to Afghan refugees. The Center continued the educational programs until the mid 1990s, receiving more than $60 million from USAID.

Although USAID funded the Center’s educational and training efforts in Afghanistan, the CIA helped to design and implement the overall program in an effort to strengthen resistance against the Soviet occupation.

“The CIA was involved in a kind of covert assistance to the resistance to fight against Soviets,” Raheem Yaseer, assistant director, told the Center for Public Integrity.

The Center, with USAID funding, established offices in Pakistan to train and educate Afghan refugees, who had formed seven mujahedeen resistance groups. Yaseer said the Center’s educational work helped the resistance against the Soviet occupation.

“We helped all of these seven parties with school supplies, developing curriculum, paying teachers, teacher training and manpower training,” Yaseer said. “They were taught about love for the country, love for freedom, hating the Soviet occupier.”

The Soviets left Afghanistan in February 1989.

In October 1997, Gouttierre told the Omaha World Herald that the CIA was involved in the overall program but did not directly provide money to him or the Center.

For 10 years, the Center received most of its Afghanistan education project funding from USAID. But after Congress ended government-sponsored aid to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, USAID stopped funding the Center. Still, it wasn’t without funding for long.

In 1997, Unocal, an American oil company, stepped in with an offer.

Unocal hoped to facilitate a business relationship with the Taliban in order to promote a natural gas pipeline project. The company was the development manager for the seven-member Central Asia Gas pipeline consortium that also included Saudi Arabia’s Delta Oil, Indonesia Petroleum, three other companies and the Turkmenistan government.

Unocal offered the Center an up-to-two-year contract worth as much $1.8 million to train Afghan men to build pipeline, which would run from Turkmenistan through a Taliban-controlled portion of Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it would be marketed. The pipeline could also be extended into India.

“For its land-locked Central Asian neighbors, Afghanistan is a strategically located ‘commerce corridor’ to the Arabian Sea,” Marty Miller, Unocal’s vice president, said in prepared testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997. He testified at a hearing before the subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asia Affairs when the CentGas project was still underway.

“They [Unocal] wanted to pave the road and create a good feeling,” Yaseer told the Center for Public Integrity. “They gave us about $900,000 [up to $1.8 million for two years] to conduct man power training and train people in crafts, carpentry, masonry, electric and building.”

As the Center for Afghanistan Studies began training civilian men, it also invited key Afghan officials to visit the university. In December 1997, Unocal sponsored a meeting that brought Taliban ministers to the United States, including the minister of mines and industry, the minister for culture and information and the minister for planning. The Taliban’s U.N. representative also joined the visiting group. During their stay, they went to Unocal’s facilities in Texas, visited the State Department and toured the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In May 1998, two Taliban ministers again visited the university on a Unocal-funded trip. Public outrage over the partnership soon erupted.

On June 1, 1998, women’s rights organizations, including the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Alliance for Peace and Freedom in Afghanistan, voiced their concern at a Unocal stockholders meeting. Newspapers nationwide covered the issue. Four days later, Unocal announced it would not renew its contract with the Center.

On Aug. 7, 1998, al Qaeda operatives bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Soon, Unocal announced that it would put the pipeline plan on hold.

In a press release announcing the withdrawal from the project, Unocal said it would, however, continue to provide “humanitarian support and skills training to Afghanistan through CARE and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.” The oil company added that neither program was designed to provide pipeline construction skills training.

The Center trained 400 Afghan men before Unocal unexpectedly pulled out of the contract.

“They were hot for it then, but they gave up,” Yaseer said of Unocal. “But [the 400 Afghan men] all have their own businesses now, so it was a useful program.”

Yaseer said the Center hopes to work with whomever ends up building the pipeline by training Afghans in vocational skills. He said the pipeline project is very complicated now because more companies are interested in being part of the consortium.

“If American companies get it, probably we will have a chance,” he said. “We will just be interested in training in vocational skills and increasing their chances of getting employment with the pipeline.”

Although the 1997 contract with Unocal ended, public scrutiny and questions about the university’s connections to the Taliban continued, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks.

On January 29, 2002, as the U.S. bombing campaign on Afghanistan slowed down, USAID awarded the Center $6.5 million to provide books and training for Afghanistan’s interim government to resume schooling. The Center, which has a textbook publishing operation in Pakistan, was to print 8 million books and train 4,000 teachers for an estimated 750,000 students by the schools’ starting date, March 23.

USAID employee Chris Brown told the Omaha World Herald that the Center was uniquely positioned to meet the textbook challenge. After USAID stopped funding the Center in 1994, Thomas E. Gouttierre, dean of International Studies and Programs and director of Afghanistan Studies at UNO, had continued to raise money privately in order to keep the Pakistan publishing operation open. Thus, in 2002, the Center was already prepared and ready to start printing the textbooks.

However, the content of the books, which UNO developed in the 1980s with USAID funding, had to be censored. Critics contended the books’ content, which included drawings of guns, bullets and mines, promoted and strengthened an era of jihad violence. So before distributing any more of the books to Afghan students, workers at the Pakistan operation started a “scrubbing” effort to remove violent pictures and references.

Yaseer said the Center printed and delivered about 15 million books on time.

But even without the violent images, the content of the books sparked controversy because they still contained Muslim tenets and verses from the Koran. Organizations that receive USAID funding must prove that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. A U.S. federal appeals court had previously ruled in a 1991 case that taxpayer funds could not be used for religious instruction, even overseas. But according to the Washington Post, the Bush White House defended the religious content, saying its presence was necessary because Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture. USAID officials also publicly defended the religious material.

In 2003, the Center lost the USAID contract for Afghan educational textbooks and teacher training. The money went, instead, to Creative Associates International Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based, private company.

“We were very disappointed,” said Center director Thomas Gouttierre, whose organization has been involved in Afghanistan education projects since 1973. “We invested our hearts in Afghanistan over a long period of time.

“Maybe it’s possible that AID was looking for a different approach that they thought would be provided by a for-profit. The trends seems to be in favor of for-profits.”

Yaseer said efficiency and quality are secondary to politics in the process of selecting companies and organizations to perform work in Afghanistan. “It depends on who knows who in the administration, USAID and the State Department,” said Yaseer, who worked as an English professor at Kabul University during the Soviet occupation.

“Universities try their best to recruit professionals, but these belt[way] bandits look for surcharges and just grab anybody that comes in handy.”

Though the Center did not get a new contract, Yaseer said it had money left over from the 2002 contract and received a no-cost extension from USAID to continue training teachers from its office in Afghanistan.

“I don’t think that we’re going after that particular [contract] again,” Gouttierre said. “Afghanistan is going through some changes.”

Gouttierre, the Center’s director, lived and worked in Afghanistan for 10 years as a Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright fellow. He also coached the Afghan National Basketball team and served as senior political affairs officer for the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission to Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997. Gouttierre met Yaseer in Kabul in 1964.

Gouttierre was also a member of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, a private, tax-exempt group founded by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Neumann and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs’ wife, Mary Ann Dubs, in 1980 to help Afghan refugees.

The Boston Globe reported in 2001 that “The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence.” Gouttierre told the paper in a Nov. 25, 2001 interview, “We’re at war. I’m an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.”

In 2001, UNO spent a total of $60,000 lobbying Congress, the White House and other agencies on budget and appropriations, science and technology, and education. In 2002, UNO spent a total of $120,000 lobbying Congress, the White House and other agencies on the same issues. For its lobbying efforts in both years, UNO hired Washington, D.C.-based firm Van Scoyoc Associates Inc.

Afghanistan contracts

The State Department is funding two of the Center’s current projects in Afghanistan.

Under a $512,000, 11-month State Department contract, the Center is bringing female Afghan teachers to the United States for training. In October 2002, a group of 13 Afghan teachers, all women, spent five weeks in Nebraska and one week in Washington, D.C. A second group of 12 female teachers is expected to arrive in the States October 29, 2003.

The State Department also gave the Center $60,468 in July 2003 to re-establish the Afghan Fulbright exchange program, an international educational exchange program that President Harry Truman signed into law in 1946. The contract calls for the Center to recruit and prepare 20 to 40 Afghan college graduates who will come to the U.S. to study at various universities for six months to one year. It has been 24 years since Afghans had access to the Fulbright program.

The Center for Afghanistan Studies is also using USAID money, remaining from a $6.5 million contract it received in 2002, to continue its field office in Kabul, which “has a small staff which can be readily incorporated into projects intended for reconstruction of Afghan education at the present or in the future,” according to the Center’s Web site. Currently, the field office staff is training teachers.

Government ties

Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, is an old friend of Zalmay Khalilzad, President’s Bush’s nominee as ambassador to Afghanistan and a former paid adviser to Unocal. While working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analysis for Unocal for the proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Gouttierre also coached Khalilzad’s basketball team at Habibia high school in Afghanistan. That team, as well as teams from various Afghan colleges, helped to form the Afghan National Basketball Team in the early 1970s.

During the December 1997 Taliban visit to the United States, Khalilzad joined the group for its trip to Unocal’s facilities in Texas. In 1997, Khalilzad, Gouttierre and Marty Miller, Unocal vice president, testified together before the Senate Foreign Relations Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs subcommittee.

In July 1999, Gouttierre gathered with a dozen Afghan leaders for a confidential meeting, after which he submitted the first of eight classified reports to the State Department.

Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. ambassador to Armenia who teaches courses in American foreign policy and Eurasia at UNO, was President George W. Bush’s special envoy on Afghanistan with the rank of ambassador from 1989 to 1992. He was also the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the State Department, United States deputy chief of mission to China from 1986 to 1989 and the director of the State Department’s Office of India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldive Affairs from 1983 to 1985.

In October 2001, Tomsen told the Chicago Tribune that when UNO hosted Afghan and sometimes Taliban officials’ visits, it served as a neutral ground where Afghan leaders, who often disagreed with one another, could informally give information to the U.S. government. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Since 1986, spanning the early years of post-Soviet occupation to the oppressive regime of the Taliban, the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the Omaha commuter campus has served as a back door for U.S. intelligence efforts to expose Afghan leaders to American ideas and democracy.”

Thomas E. Eighmy, research associate for the Center for Afghanistan Studies, is a retired USAID officer.

Ronald Roskens, who is a former UNO chancellor , was the director of USAID in the first Bush administration.

“Jihad – Often many different wars and conflicts arise among people, which cause material damages and loss of human life. If these wars and disputes occur among people for the sake of community, nation, territory, or even because of verbal differences, and for the sake of progress…”

This page is from a third-grade language arts textbook dating from the mujahidin period. A copy of the book was purchased new in Kabul in May 2000.

….In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and operated by the Afghan mujahidin (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy. These schoolbooks provided the mujahidin (who, after a ten-year struggle, drove the Soviet occupying forces from Afghanistan in 1989) with a medium for promoting political propaganda and inculcating values of Islamic militancy into a new generation of holy warriors prepared to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam. Consider the following introduction to the Persian alphabet in a first-grade language arts book:

Alif [is for] Allah.
Allah is one.

Bi [is for] Father (baba).
Father goes to the mosque…

Pi [is for] Five (panj).
Islam has five pillars…

Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang).
Javad obtains rifles for the Mujahidin…

Jim [is for] Jihad.
Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahidin…

Dal [is for] Religion (din).
Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam…

…..

One of the responsibilities of the mujahidin-operated Education Center for Afghanistan

was to write, print, and distribute textbooks. The ECA was funded by the Education Program for Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), under a $50 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development that ran from September 1986 through June 1994……

This essay is drawn from a longer, unpublished analysis, “Nationalism, Revolution, and Jihad: Images

of Violence in Afghan Primary Education Textbooks,” the research for which was made possible by

a David L. Boren graduate fellowship. The author would like to thank Jamsheed Choksy, Paul Losensky, and M. Nazif Shahrani for their comments and insights.

Soviet-era textbooks still controversial

The title of this story from a Dari language textbook is “Jihad.” An excerpt from the book’s next page reads, “Jihad is the kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands from the enemies of Islam. If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.”

Fifth-grade Afghan refugees once learned the Pashto language from characters named Maqbool and Basheer.

Dick and Jane, this duo was not.

In one story, the fictional friends see a group of Afghan mujahedeen cleaning their weapons as they prepare to fight the Soviet army.

Maqbool tells Basheer they should help the rebel fighters ready their machine guns. Basheer concurs. Soon they are meeting with a mujahedeen commander.

“We want you to help clean the weapons and fight the Russians in jihad,” he tells Maqbool and Basheer.

The youngsters agree. Now, presumably, they are soldiers themselves.

The story, and many like it, appear in the millions of textbooks written, printed and distributed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The books taught reading and math and sought to turn children against the Red Army and the Afghan communist government.

The textbooks’ publisher: The University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, operating inside Pakistan on a U.S. government grant.

To the center’s longtime director, the textbooks are byproducts of a dark era when Russian bombs killed Afghan schoolchildren and rebel forces fought to save their country.

The center’s sole interest, according to him, was to deliver education to children who weren’t getting any.

“I won’t apologize in 2005 for something done in 1988,” he says. “At the time, Afghans were being killed. It would’ve been nice if they wrote, ‘We love you, Russian brother; please don’t kill us.’

“That’s not reality.”

Critics including Nebraskans for Peace and an Afghan education official think Gouttierre’s center should apologize for its part in producing books that glorified rebel fighters and taught students their faith compelled them to fight communism.

Such Cold War-inspired propaganda encouraged violence against the so-called “Enemies of Islam,” says Mark Vasina, president of Nebraskans for Peace.

Years later, Islamic extremists — some of them educated in American-financed schools and armed with American weapons — decided the real enemy of Islam was in fact the United States, he says.

“We should understand quite well that the job of textbooks is to teach the children to love peace,” says Abdul Nabi Wahidi, an Afghan education official now in charge of textbook content. “It was completely against education to try to get the children to fight, and to give them words which stoked their anger.”

The UNO center published an estimated 15 million textbooks in the years after it won $60 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, a branch of the State Department, to educate Afghan children.

Leaders from seven exiled political parties wrote the books, according to Gouttierre. The authors used content they’d smuggled out of the country when the Russians invaded.

They then sprinkled in violent imagery — bombs, overturned tanks, AK-47s and swords — and anti-Soviet rhetoric that often urged schoolchildren to take up arms.

“Just as school boards in America have control over the content of curriculum, so too did the Afghan Ministry of Education have control over its textbooks,” NU Regent Howard Hawks wrote in response to a Nebraskans for Peace complaint this year.

Anti-communist rhetoric was erased from the books after the Soviets retreated in 1989, says Raheem Yaseer, the Center for Afghanistan Studies’ assistant director.

The books occasionally surfaced in Afghan schools during the 1990s because various groups, including the Taliban, stole the content and reprinted it illegally, he says.

They surfaced even after the Clinton administration cut nearly all funding of Afghan education, including UNO’s project, in 1995.

“That was disastrous,” Yaseer says. “The new textbooks were not finished. But we had to leave, because the money was gone.”

The center again published textbooks after the fall of the Taliban, printing millions more that bore little resemblance to the Soviet-era books. That effort again was cut short when the latest U.S. government book contract was awarded to Creative Associates and not UNO.

The center is still firmly entrenched in the book business, though, thanks mainly to printing presses that crank out campaign posters, women’s magazines and Dari-English dictionaries in Kabul.

The Afghan Educational Press is an offshoot of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, Yaseer says.

All of its profit is reinvested into the business, in part because the UNO center itself can’t legally profit from the venture, Yaseer says.

The money has allowed the press to upgrade old machines and up the number of printing presses to 25.

A cafeteria serves 70 employees food, and a dormitory houses workers who must stay overnight on the property. Many of the employees are transported by seven company vehicles, including two buses.

UNO does not legally own any of the equipment or employ any of the workers, yet the head of the press reports to Yaseer, he says.

Debate on textbooks, Pakistani style

….Dr AH Nayyar replied that Pakistani course books were not like this in the past, which clearly meant that the Islamic content in the books after 1979 was not a part of our thinking after 1965 and even after 1971. He disclosed that during the American jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan the Americans got the University of Nebraska to write up courses on jihad for textbooks in Afghanistan. Now the Bush administration was once again approaching the University of Nebraska to fashion a new curriculum to take jihad out of the Afghan textbooks. He said it was not SDPI that was trying to take out Islam from textbook at the behest of the United States. He said SDPI had not taken any funds from America for the study conducted; the funding had in fact come from Holland. Qasimi retorted that now the Americans wanted jihad out of Pakistani textbooks……

“…The classical and well-documented example is that of the Afghan Islamic movements who overthrew the Soviet forces after a jihad inspired and orchestrated by Pakistan’s Islamic-minded, U.S.-sponsored military dictator, Ziaul Haq. Special textbooks were published in local Afghan languages, designed by the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant in the early 1980s. Written by American Afghanistan experts and anti-Soviet Afghan educators, they aimed at promoting jihadi values and militant training among Afghans. USAID paid the University of Nebraska $51 million from 1984 to 1994 to develop and design these textbooks, which were mostly printed in Pakistan. Over 13 million were distributed at Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madrasas (religious seminaries where Muslim priests are educated and trained) where students learned basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles. After the war ended, these textbooks were still used in Afghan schools. Even the Taliban found them suitable.

Similarly, Palestinian and Egyptian Islamic movements were once beholden to Washington as counterweights to the socialist, secular Arab nationalism of Yasser Arafat and Gemal Abdul Nasir. The fundamentalist Wahhabi Saudi kingdom, the single largest source of support and succor to movements of “Islamic renewal” (including many of the institutions identified by the USIP report as “America’s most obvious allies and potential partners”) remains a close American ally even today. If anything, the unruly movements of jihad and Sharia implementation are a direct product of America’s policy of containing and countering communism, which in the process squeezed out the liberal, democratic, and secular discourse from Muslim societies….”

So, the United States is breaking no new ground as it adopts the policy of funding religious textbook reform, strengthening “moderate” Islamic movements, and other charitable, literary, and educational institutions identified by the USIP as capable of and eager to reclaim the Islamic heritage from the extremists….

Jehad and The Curriculum

Pakistan’s so-called religious parties are up in arms at the rumour that references to Jehad are to be removed from Pakistani textbooks – biology, for example. Never mind the relevance of jehad (and that too, a particular kind of jehad) to biology;

The Pakistan government’s policy of appeasement continues. “I am a fundamentalist,” declared Federal Education Minister Zubeida Jalal in a television discussion recently (‘Capital Talk’, Geo TV, March 25, 2004), meaning that she believes in the fundamentals of Islam. “But I am not a terrorist.” Good for her. However, the point is not what her personal beliefs are, but what kind of beliefs the Pakistani education system is inculcating.

Those who blew themselves up at the Quetta Imambargah, taking dozens of innocent lives with them, would also undoubtedly affirm that they are devout Muslims, and deny that they are terrorists. But actions speak louder than words, and those who think that by killing others they are participating in a jehad, obviously have a very narrow and distorted view of Jehad, its principles and its true spirit. Where does this view come from?

The idea of Jehad was incorporated into the Pakistani Curriculum after the start of the Afghan war. This “is not a coincidence”, as Pakistani academic A.H. Nayyar notes. At that point it suited Washington, and its most allied of allies, Pakistan, to encourage and glorify the “Mujahideen”, or holy warriors, in the war against the Soviets – and an American institution of higher education was asked to formulate textbooks for Pakistani schools accordingly, says Dr Nayyar. “The institution was University of Nebraska at Omaha, which has a center for Afghan studies which was tasked by CIA in the early eighties to rewrite textbooks for Afghan refugee children. The new books included hate material even in arithmetic. For example, if a man has five bullets and two go into the heads of Russian soldiers, how many are left, kind of stuff. This was exposed in a research thesis from the New School, New York in about 2002.”

Since the Soviets are no more, the “Mujahideen” have not only mutated into “Taliban” but have also outlived their usefulness, the same American university has been given an additional grant to “re-re-write textbooks, taking out material on jehad, etc”, as announced by none Laura Bush, wife of US President George W. Bush in early 2002, adds Dr Nayyar. “But the funny thing is that the books of early eighties were very acceptable to the Taliban, except figures and pictures. So they continued with them, only blackening the pictures. After the rout of the Taliban, because the new books could not arrive in time, the Karzai government (read the Americans) was forced to use the earlier books already available, but perhaps now perhaps the newer books have arrived in sufficient quantity to make the older books redundant.”….

Can Pakistan Work? A Country in Search of Itself

“….The U.S. response has been a series of flips and flops, largely determined by immediate political needs rather than long-term strategic thinking. President Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on Islamabad but waived them following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. A series of presidential waivers allowed U.S. economic and military assistance to continue flowing through 1990, as a reward for Pakistan’s anti-Soviet efforts in Afghanistan. This was despite the fact that Pakistan disclosed in 1984 that it could enrich uranium for nuclear weapons and in 1987 that it could assemble a nuclear device. Even as the president of the United States solemnly informed Congress that Pakistan was not seeking to make nuclear weapons, anyone in Islamabad or Rawalpindi could hail a taxicab and ask to be taken to what was (and is) known as the “bomb factory.” Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Washington toughened its stance on Pakistan’s nuclear program and, after the 1998 nuclear tests (which were in response to similar moves by India), imposed harsh new sanctions. But soon after September 11, 2001-when Islamabad regained the strategic significance it had lost at the end of the Cold War-Washington dropped all nuclear-related sanctions, in part as a reward for Musharraf’s decision to join the U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban.

Throughout this period, it was never a secret that Pakistan was and continues to be host to an array of radical Islamist groups. These pathological social and religious formations have a variety of aims-some target the American empire, whereas others focus on the more limited goal of “liberating” Kashmir or eliminating religious rivals-but all trace their origins to the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad, which over the course of a decade profoundly affected Pakistani society, culture, and politics and unleashed developments that would have dire consequences down the road. “During the first Afghan war, the [Inter-Services Intelligence agency’s] strategy was to support hard-line Islamic groups, and with American concurrence, the ISI characterized the war against the Soviet intruders as a religious struggle against atheistic communism,” Cohen writes. “Again with American encouragement, young Muslims were recruited to the ’cause’ from the Arab and Islamic world, inadvertently creating a cohort that was to eventually form al Qaeda.”

Cohen uses the words “concurrence” and “encouragement,” but these are unsatisfactory descriptions: it is clear who the senior partner in this arrangement was. As the junior partner, Pakistan received a support package from Washington that included help with organization and logistics, military technology, and ideological support for sustaining and encouraging the Afghan resistance. Of these, the last was by far the most important, serving as it did to attract men and materiel from the Arab world and beyond to the jihad in Afghanistan.

CIA funds went to buy advertisements inviting hardened and ideologically dedicated men to fight in Afghanistan, and a $50 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant, administered by the University of Nebraska, Omaha, paid for textbooks that exhorted Afghan children “to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs.” These were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas (Islamic schools) and are still widely available in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally, the United States, funneled support to the mujahideen. Ronald Reagan feted jihadist leaders on the White House lawn, and the U.S. press lionized them. When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in the face of the U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi-Egyptian alliance in 1988, a chapter of history seemed complete. But the costs of this victory revealed themselves over the course of the next decade. By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the victorious alliance had unleashed a dynamic beyond its control….”

Schoolbooks into Afghanistan…for 20 Years?

And why is President Bush hiding it?

By Jared Israel [Posted 9 April 2002]

Or perhaps I should say, “Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that’s waiting to happen?”

Because it has been almost unreported in the Western media that the US government shipped, and continues to ship, millions of Islamist (or Islamic fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan.

Only one English-speaking newspaper we could find has investigated this issue: the Washington Post. The story appeared March 23rd. [1]

Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…”
— Washington Post, 23 March 2002
See footnote [1]

According to the Post the U.S. is now “…wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism.”

So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks “steeped a generation in [Islamist] violence.”

How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?

=============

Let’s be reasonable

=============

Nobody with normal intelligence could expect to distribute millions of violent Islamist schoolbooks without influencing school children towards violent Islamism. Therefore one would assume that the unnamed US officials who, we are told, are distressed at these “unintended consequences” must previously have been unaware of the Islamist content of the schoolbooks.

But surely someone was aware. The US government can’t write, edit, print and ship millions of violent, Muslim fundamentalist primers into Afghanistan without high officials in the US government approving those primers.

So if the books weren’t supposed to be Islamist, that is if their fanatical content contradicted US policy in Afghanistan, shouldn’t the mass media and top politicians, such as President George Bush, now be calling for an investigation? Shouldn’t they be demanding to know the identity of the official or officials who subverted the intended US policy by flooding Afghanistan with jihad primers?

Indeed, considering the disastrous consequences, shouldn’t US officials and the media be questioning the very practice of violating the sovereignty of other countries by distributing millions of Islamic fundamentalist schoolbooks?

Yet using the media search engine, Lexis-Nexis, we could find no evidence that any mainstream Western newspaper, other than the Washington Post, nor any TV station or government leader ever questioned, let alone denounced, the export of millions of Islamist schoolbooks to Afghanistan.

Quite the contrary.

For example here’s what the Boston Globe wrote in an article about the obstacles to education in Afghanistan, a year after the US invasion:

“The obstacles to accomplishing that goal are enormous. What few schools impoverished Afghanistan once had – about 2,000 – are now all virtually destroyed, pummeled by gunfire or turned into refugee camps. Teachers here have not been paid for months, even years. Those schoolbooks that still exist are pro-Taliban screeds and deemed unusable.
— Elizabeth Neuffer in the Boston Globe, March 17, 2002 [2]

The article implies that the unusable textbooks were produced by and for the Taliban – “pro-Taliban screeds.” The author, Elizabeth Neuffer, is the Globe’s UN Bureau Chief. Surely she must know that the textbooks in question were made in USA and that the US is continuing to ship Islamist textbooks into Afghanistan. Instead of exposing the scandal that the US promotes Muslim fanaticism in Afghanistan, she misrepresents the books and misleads her readers.

Other newspapers spun more elaborate lies. Here is the Daily Telegraph from Sydney, Australia:

[Daily Telegraph excerpt starts here]

“AFGHAN children ran, skipped and dawdled to their classrooms like pupils everywhere yesterday for the start of a new school year — with girls and women teachers back in class and subjects like math replacing the Islamic dogma of the Taliban.

“In a symbolic break from a war-scarred past, children opened new textbooks written by Afghan scholars based at universities in the US.

“There are even pictures of people — images banned by the fundamentalist Taliban.”

By beginning the article with the irrelevant but cheery image – “Afghan children ran, skipped and dawdled…[etc].” – the Telegraph prepares us for an upbeat news experience. We are not disappointed. We are told that in the new textbooks:

“There are even pictures of people — images banned by the fundamentalist Taliban.”
— Daily Telegraph See footnote [3]

Again we get the impression that the Taliban were responsible for the bad old texts but due to the US invasion “children opened new textbooks…”.

Unfortunately, as the Washington Post investigators reported:

“Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.” — Washington Post, March 23, 2002

Other than their objections to the human face, the Taliban were perfectly happy with the US-produced primers.

As if presenting evidence of a sea change, the Telegraph tells that now Afghan children have schoolbooks “written by Afghan scholars based at universities in the US.”

Similarly, an article five weeks earlier in the Omaha World-Herald declares that, “Afghanistan stands at least a chance of hauling a modern, healthy society up out of the ashes of war and oppression,” partly because University of Nebraska at Omaha “officials and staffers” will be “cranking up their presses in neighboring Pakistan” to churn out schoolbooks, all funded by “a $ 6.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development [AID].” [4]

Neither newspaper mentions that the bad old schoolbooks “were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies.” — Washington Post, March 23, 2002)

What about the US government? Have any US congressmen demanded an investigation to find out who in the US government was involved in the production of jihad primers that “steeped a generation in [Islamist] violence”?

No they have not.

=====================

Speaking of forked tongues…

=====================

What about George Walker Bush?

You may recall that George and Laura Bush have made passionate speeches denouncing Islamic fundamentalism. At first Mr. Bush told us we needed to attack Afghanistan in order to stop Mr. bin Laden. But later on he and Laura Bush told us we were fighting to crush the vicious fundamentalists.

Has George Bush said anything about the textbooks?

Yes, Mr. Bush talked about the jihad primers in a March 16th radio broadcast. He held nothing back:

“And before the end of the year, we’ll have sent almost 10 million of them [that is, new textbooks] to the children of Afghanistan. These textbooks will teach tolerance and respect for human dignity instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

Note the phrase, “instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

So according to Bush, Afghan school children won’t have to contend with bad schoolbooks anymore because finally the US has taken charge, replacing those other guys, those evil educators who published textbooks “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.”

The amazing thing is not only that he tells such total lies but that he delivers them with such righteous indignation.

What about the new textbooks? Will they “teach tolerance and respect for human dignity” as Honest George promises?

To be precise (which may be unwise in today’s world) how will the new textbooks that George Bush Junior is shipping into Afghanistan differ from the old ones? You know, those old books that were also designed at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and paid for by the US government agency, AID? You know, those old, un-American books that George Bush Junior attacked for “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry”? Those terrible old books that were shipped into Afghanistan by Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior?

Here’s the Washington Post again:

“On Feb. 4, [Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID’s Central Asia Task Force] arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

— Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So it appears that the only change is that some violent pictures have been removed from the printing plates and some fruit has been added. There is no indication that the texts have been changed.

What does a non-fundamentalist Afghan educator think about the new schoolbooks?

“‘The pictures [in the old schoolbooks] are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse,’ said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator who is a program coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, a Pakistan-based nonprofit.'”
[My emphasis — J.I.]

— Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So the United States government is right now shipping into Afghanistan millions of Islamic Fundamentalist schoolbooks whose texts, according to a non-Fundamentalist Afghan educator, are not just “horrendous,” they are “much worse.”

Is it possible that this is all a terrible mistake? That Mr. Bush and US AID just don’t know what’s in the new schoolbooks?

Apparently not.

According to the Washington Post, the “White House defends the religious content” of the schoolbooks. And as for US AID, the Agency for International Development, which pays for the books:

‘It’s not AID’s policy to support religious instruction,’ Stratos said. ‘But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity.'”
— Washington Post, March 23, 2002

So because education is predominantly secular it’s OK for the schoolbooks to be entirely fundamentalist. Likewise, since marriage is predominantly monogamous it’s OK to cheat. And since banks are predominantly places where people deposit money, it’s OK to rob a bank.

Got it?

Mr. Bush describes the texts of the old books as “indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” But note, having been republished in the new books, these exact same texts have been reborn. Now they are “religious instruction” (says US AID) and “religious content” (says the White House). It’s a modern miracle.

Reading these news reports and statements one might feel a certain sympathy for citizens of the US and allied countries, required to hold in their minds at one time a) the conviction that Mr. Bush is sincerely fighting Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and b) the knowledge that the US is spending millions of dollars to indoctrinate Afghan school children with Islamic fundamentalism.

Not to worry. This problem has been solved by the US and allied mass media, which, with the exception of the Washington Post, have never told their readers and viewers who it was that produced the old books or what it is that’s in the new ones.

Even the Washington Post has pulled its punches. For example, consider the headline of the March 23rd article, the only one that deals critically with the jihad primers.

Here’s the headline. (Headlines are quite important because with any given article, most people only read the headline.)

“Violent Soviet-Era textbooks.” This phrase doesn’t even make it clear that the books were shipped in by the US government! They could have been hateful Russian books.

And the phrase “Complicate Afghan Education Efforts” sounds like the books are hindering current US attempts at effecting progressive change. Nobody would guess from this headline that US AID has been forcing Islamic fundamentalist texts on Afghan kids for 20 years or that they’re still importing the same texts today, minus the guns and with more fruit.

In the body of the article the Post asserts without evidence that steeping “a generation in [Islamist] violence” was an “unintended consequence” of giving Afghan children violent Islamist schoolbooks.

“Unintended consequence” is fast becoming the US Establishment’s favorite excuse for the many disasters of its foreign policy. “We didn’t know. We weren’t prepared. We used old maps. We didn’t see the train. We thought there were tanks in the refugee column. Who could have expected this to happen?” and on and on.

But does the case of the Islamist textbooks involve unintended consequences? Doesn’t it in fact appear to be deliberate policy?

2) The Boston Globe March 17, 2002, Sunday, Third Edition Focus; Pg. E1 “The Task: Educating A Generation Of Women, And Quickly With A Female Literacy Rate Of Less Than 4 Percent, Teachers Face Obstacles Even With The Taliban Gone” By Elizabeth Neuffer (The Globe’s United Nations Bureau Chief)

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Jihad and Jihadism

by Abid Ullah Jan

(Monday, July 5, 2004)

“In short, Jihadism have two variant meanings in the contemporary world. It is a label for the enemies of the US occupations in its imperial quest for global domination. Jihadism could suddenly change from a demonizing label to become a “holy war” sponsored by the US in case, say France occupies Saudi Arabia or Kuwait tomorrow. It would become a legal, compulsory, communal effort to redeem the territories occupied by France.”
Jihad in its various forms and stages is obligatory upon Muslims. Jihadism is a product of US opportunism. Jihad is always for self-actualisation, eradication of mischief and eliminating oppression with a focus on spiritual aspect at all levels. Jihadism is a double edge sword used for self aggrandisement and expansion of the American rule through the use of lies and indiscriminate force with a narrow focus on worldly gains only.

For Muslims, it was a Jihad in Afghanistan. However, for the US, with no relation to Islam and sympathy for Muslims whatsoever, it was simply promotion of violence to weaken an arch enemy, the Soviet Union. It was pure Jihadism, a selective practice and policy without any concern for the people under occupation.

Today, Jihadism and Jihadists are mere labels that the US uses as a bogyman to criminalise resistance to its illegitimate occupations and to justify the policy of total domination through its “war on terrorism.”

The purpose of sponsoring Jihadism in Afghanistan was not to spread Islamic faith, defend Muslims or reap rewards in the hereafter. If it were Jihad based on the Islamic concept, it should have been launched and sponsored by the US simultaneously in Kashmir, Palestine and Afghanistan. Relying on Jihadism then and now is simply to extend sovereign American power.

There is no concept of Jihadism in Islam. In the strict dictionary sense, as a suffix, -ism means “action, process; practice”. As a noun, “ism” means a “doctrine; theory; system of principles”. In the real world the meaning of -ism is not as simple. There is a concept of oppression associated with -ism. It needs a thorough examination to understand how -ism related oppression affects oppressed people and if there is any place for it in Islam. There is a concept of power — power-over and power-with — associated with “ism.”

When a person or a group of people has power over another person or group, the person or group with power-over

a) can control or make the other group do something, whether that group wants to or not

b) have more privilege ¾ status, social recognition, and freedom to do what they want than the other group

c) have more resources or wealth and receive better treatment than the other group

d) have the authority to define or describe the other group.

Here comes the concept of oppression: the “ism.” The “power-over” that one group uses against another is oppression, equivalent to “ism,” as in “racism,” “sexism,” or “adultism.” Oppression, or “ism,” is a name for how the powerful use that power to control the weak ¾ hurt them, make them feel bad, or get something from them ¾ or receive better treatment and more resources than them; all for the worldly objectives.

Of course any group or nation can hurt or mistreat the other. Any people can be prejudiced about the other, making stereotypical assumptions about each other. What makes mistreatment into oppression is prejudice plus power. Prejudice is one of the products of Nationalism and Patriotism. The reason there is no place for any ism in Islam is that there is no place for prejudice in Islam.

The Qur’an describes origin of prejudice (15:33, 15:39-40, 2:34); warns of division on the basis of prejudice (3:103, 42:13, 6:159, 8:46, 21:93, 35:28, 49:10 ); forbids not to mock, judge or hurt another because you think you are better than the other (49:11, 31:18) and advises to discern people by piety, not prejudice (49:13).

Since prejudice plus power is considered equal to an “ism,” Jihadism is considered Muslims’ prejudice against non-Muslims combined with the military power-over non-Muslims. It is considered just like prejudice against young people plus power-over that makes adultism, or prejudice against people of color plus power-over that makes racism. The same negative simplicity is applied to the term Islamism which means Islam’s inherent prejudice against non-Muslims which is combined with the religious and military power-over to oppress and dominate all others.

The US apparently supported the Islamic concept of Jihad against the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. Yet very few know that it was simply the US sponsorship of Jihadism (American prejudice against communism combined with military and economic muscle to over-power the Soviet Union) that started long before there was a need for Muslims to join Jihad.

In an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, the former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, made a stunning confession:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan, December 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [1]

Earlier, the former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs, From the Shadows, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. The question is: From where did come these Mujahideen when there was no time for Jihad indeed?

Having encouraged the Soviets to invade Afghanistan — just like luring Saddam into Kuwait — the US armed itself with a pretext for motivating, mobilizing and arming a population for Jihadism against the occupation forces, which they rightly considered as Jihad.

An aspect of the US Jihadism was to produce — which are now called — Jihadists through extensive dozes of Jihad to children under the guise of education. The Washington Post’s Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway report about this process of spreading, what the US now labels as “Jihadism”:

“In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The “Primers”, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…” [2]

Unlike the ongoing efforts to eliminate the Islamic concept of Jihad from school curriculum around the Muslim world, Stephens and Ottaway identify how the US governmental and educational organizations were involved in actually developing Jihad-focused textbooks. They write:

“Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID [Agency for International Development] grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.”

Under this Jihadism project, the images and talk of resistance to occupation were craftily intermingled with regular education:

“Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited US interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders.”

An examination of a textbook produced shocking results:

“An aid-worker in the region reviewed an unrevised 100-page book and counted 43 pages containing violent images or passages.”

The writers of the Washington Post story go on to provide an appalling example of the material:

“One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier’s head is missing. Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin [sic], who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.”

The United States’ Jihadism successfully transformed Afghan children into true freedom fighters. None of the present analyst, obsessed with using the word Jihadism and Jihadists, wrote a single word to condemn the US ways to promoting violence. Many of the presently labeled “Jihadists” live on from that period to join or morally support the resistance against new occupations.

When it was Jihadism on the part of the US, almost all Muslims accepted it as the US role in Islamic Jihad. Now, that the US considers Muslims Jihad as Jihadism and terrorism, no one is ready to point out that it is the extension of the same Afghan resistance which the US is reaping at a much higher cost than its cost of cultivation.

In the Muslim world, resistance to the US occupation is as much Jihad today as it was in the 80s. The same requests for God to avenge the occupiers’ actions pour down from mosque minarets, and according to Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times (April 24, 2004), “some women university students wear Osama bin Laden T-shirts under their enveloping robes” — not for what the US blames him, but for his logic of calling the oppressed into action: to resist occupations. The calls to resist oppression are based in Islamic teachings, which the US sponsored Jihadism inculcated in Muslim mind for so long to its own disadvantage.

Now that the US comes to reap the whirlwind, many Americans consider attacks on US occupation forces a shocking and unsettling crime. Many thousand civilians were killed in Mujahideen attacks on Kabul and other cities where people chose not to leave their homes. The Saudi Interior Ministry then chose not to issue statements like these: “May God curse you, you vermin, you people of filth and not Jihad.”

Muslims could never launch such an effective campaign for Jihad as the US did for Jihadism. Most of those who resist the Anglo-American occupations today rely on the same momentum of 1980s and the same theological underpinnings to justify their actions against occupation.

At the government levels, Muslim countries have quickly shifted from American Jihadism to American anti-Jihad mode for their own sustainability. Saudi Arabia was one of the Chief financer of Jihad in Afghanistan. Now, for the advisor to the Saudi ambassador to Britain Mujahideen are mere “jihadis.” Musharraf claims to be fighting Jihadists for the interest of Pakistan.

Pakistan has not only sealed its border but is also acting like an occupying force in its own land to subdue any assistance to the freedom fighters in Afghanistan. On the other hand, Saudi officials say they are ensuring that the border with Iraq is sealed. They have installed heat sensors to detect movement.

The US and its allies in Jihad against the Soviet Union have a troubled history with preaching Jihad in the past and facing Jihad in the present. Actually, Jihad was officially sanctioned by almost all governments around the world against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. They thought they could rid themselves of the Red Menace, but instead their sponsorship of some basic principles of resisting injustice and oppression has now started to haunt them.

To discredit resistance in Iraq and turn it into a global threat, American analysts don’t hesitate to call it a movement for establishing Khilafah. Robert Spencer writes: “Iraq is just one battlefield of many: Muslim militants all over the world are moved today to murder and mayhem for the sake of the caliphate.” [3]

In his latest column, Spencer argues: “If he [Bush] began to use the word ‘jihad’ the way those he identifies as terrorists and evildoers do, he could in one stroke remove charges of opportunism and lack of focus from the Democrats’ arsenal. For this is in fact the war we’re in: a war against people who identify themselves as jihadis, not as terrorists.” [4]

In other words, freedom fighters’ war to end Soviet Union’s occupation in Afghanistan was Jihad and the US war against the same freedom fighters is a “war on terror… a defensive action against global jihadists.” [5]

Identifying Jihadists and terrorists is further simplified in the light of Ronald Reagan’s definition of communists. Spencer believes, a Jihadist is “someone who reads the Qur’an and Sunnah” and anti-Jihadist is “someone who understands how these Islamic texts are used to recruit and motivate terrorists.” [6] Going by the same definition, the US officials were the greatest Jihadists — immersed in Jihadism — who used Islamic text better than anyone else to motivate and recruit what the Soviet Union considered as terrorists.

In short, Mujahideen, greeted in the White House, were the force to achieve freedom in Afghanistan. Now, a 180-degree turn shows “freedom is under attack by the warriors of jihad.”

Jihadism and Islamism are the weapons for what the US analysts are bent on proving as the US war with Islam. They proudly quote former Muslims, such as Ibn Warraq: “There are very useful analogies to be drawn between communism and Islam,” says Ibn Warraq. “Communism has been defeated, at least for the moment; Islamism has not, and unless a reformed, tolerant, liberal kind of Islam emerges soon, perhaps the final battle will be between Islam and Western democracy.”

It is encouraging that Ibn Warraq didn’t use any prefix with Islam, such as “fundamentalist,” “extremist,” or “radical” Islam. It is a straight forward war with Islam and those Muslims “who read the Qur’an and Sunnah.” This must be enough to give an idea that Jihadism was used as an ideological tool to intensify war against the Soviet Union. It is now used as a demonising label to consolidate occupation and eliminate any resistance.

In short, Jihadism have two variant meanings in the contemporary world. It is a label for the enemies of the US occupations in its imperial quest for global domination. Jihadism could suddenly change from a demonizing label to become a “holy war” sponsored by the US in case, say France occupies Saudi Arabia or Kuwait tomorrow. It would become a legal, compulsory, communal effort to redeem the territories occupied by France.

The path away from state-terrorism, conquest and enslavement lies in the US government forthrightly acknowledging the historic role of its Jihadism, followed by apologies to Jihadism’s victims, developing a base for nonviolent resolution of the global issues with justice and (the hardest part) actually ceasing to wage wars, which are no more than Jihadism through GIs and allies — a struggle in the cause of worldly gains at the expense of innocent lives.

Unfortunately, such a process of redemption is not now under way; the US Jihadism will probably continue until the war lords in Washington are defeated by the superior wisdom of the American public. Only when the US Jihadism is defeated will ordinary Americans finally find their voice and truly begin the hard work of moderating America.

CIA Agent Sees Dead People

“….The United States’ Jihadism successfully transformed Afghan

children into true freedom fighters…”

Then we have secretive American government figures, like Congressman Charlie Wilson and Zbigniew Brzezinski (the self-proclaimed father of the anti-Soviet jihad idea) traveling to the secret camps in Pakistan to cheer the Afghans on, telling them “God is on your side,” as seen in the following:

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Front row: Pakistani President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq (left) and President Carter (right). Zbigniew Brzezinski is in the center of the back row. [Source: Wally McNamee / Corbis]National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski writes a memo to President Jimmy Carter about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which has just begun (see December 8, 1979). Brzezinski focuses on fears that success in Afghanistan could give the Soviets access to the Indian Ocean, even though Afghanistan is a landlocked country. He suggests the US should continue aid to the Afghan mujaheddin, which actually began before the war and spurred the Soviets to invade (see 1978 and July 3, 1979). He says, “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels and some technical advice.” He does not give any warning that such aid will strengthen Islamic fundamentalism. He also concludes, “[W]e must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and alas, a decision that our security problem toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” Carter apparently accepts Brzezinski’s advice. Author Joe Trento will later comment, “With that, the United States agreed to let a country admittedly in turmoil proceed to develop nuclear weapons.” [Trento, 2005, pp. 167-168] Trento and fellow author David Armstrong will add: “Once [Pakistan] became a partner in the anti-Soviet Afghan campaign and the Carter administration adopted a more lenient view of Pakistan’s nuclear activities, the [procurement] network [run by A. Q. Khan] expanded its operations dramatically. It would soon evolve into a truly global enterprise, obtaining the vast array of sophisticated equipment with which Pakistan would eventually build a bomb.” [Armstrong and Trento, 2007, pp. 99]

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Zbigniew Brzezinski represents views very close to the mainstream US foreign policy communities’ understanding of the world. This is especially true under a Democratic president, but the differences between US Democrats and US Republicans on foreign policy are so small that I do not think they are meaningful outside of the United States. Neocons do not dispute Brzezinski’s basic assumptions. As an example, there is not much practical difference in policy between late George W. Bush in 2007 and Barack Obama in 2008. Obama has not even given a foreign policy speech that George W. Bush could not have given with fairly minor revisions. Brzezinski’s article(text) puts a wide range of these views in one place and I think it can be instructive to examine them. I have to point out that this article was written before early December so there may have been developments that Brzezinski could not have been aware of when he wrote. Quotes from Brzezinski’s article are numbered and bold.

1)
• Islam is not an enemy, and the “global war on terror” does not define the United States’ current role in the world;
• the United States will be a fair-minded and assertive mediator when it comes to attaining lasting peace between Israel and Palestine;

This is a good place to start. Most Americans do not understand that Brzezinski’s first statement simply is not true. Most Americans would like it to be true. And in fact, given the limits to the American ability to examine America’s own basic consensus premises, it appears true. But it is not true. The US really is at war in a very real sense against Islam.

There need not be a war between the US and Islam. The US could support one state that accepts all refugees and guarantees individual rights to Jewish people which would end the need for a host of policies undertaken by the US in the region that harm mostly Muslims, but also non-Jewish Christians, non-religious people and followers of other religions in the region. But the US does not support a one state solution. The US today does not seem capable of even envisioning a one state solution which would mean the failure of the Zionist project. As long as this is the case, the US will, naively and to some degree unknowingly, continue to wage war against the non-Jewish people of Israel’s region.

The United States is participating and in many ways enabling the starvation of 1.5 million people in Gaza. That is what enemies do. There is a long list of provocations the US implements in the Middle East. The list includes efforts to deny political representation to huge populations of countries in Israel’s region. It includes multiple sanctions, it includes the two occupations the US is now implementing and it includes the current destabilization of Pakistan.

The US mainstream consensus accepts as a basic premise that there must be a Jewish state in Palestine. Given that constraint, US efforts are both reasonable and necessary. When Brzezinski uses the term “fair minded” he implicitly includes his premise that there must exist a Jewish majority state in that term. This is a failure on Brzezinski’s part to perceive that there can be a different understanding of fairness than his own.

Hamas must be starved out of office or they would set a precedent that would threaten the security of Israel as a Jewish-majority political entity. Dictators should be supported, because they are “good for the region“. Countries that are not good for the region must be punished. The US can and should occupy countries that otherwise would use their resources to threaten the status of Jewish majority Israel or its supporters. Massive bribery that distorts the entire political system of a country is acceptable and preferable to that country following the preferences of its population which would be to leave alone elements of their societies that would strike back against Israel or its supporters.

If you are unable, as Brzezinski, Obama and most members of the US foreign policy are unable, to question the cosmic necessity of the existence of a Jewish state, then the US is making reasonable and fair efforts to bring about peace and coexistence. If you are able to question the necessity of a Jewish state in Palestine, then the US is siding with injustice and in doing so imposing entire swathes of needless and unprovoked misery on a tremendous number of Muslim people.

With Brzezinski’s premises, the US is not at war with Islam. For people who do not accept his premise that there must be a Jewish state, the US is at war with Islam, at least in Israel’s greater region. The general US failure to question the premise that there must be a Jewish majority state in Palestine comes from the fact that supporters of Israel have successfully established the threat to falsely accuse anyone who examines that premise of being an anti-Jewish bigot. We’ll come back to this because it is very interesting how much the US as a nation pays for this established threat of false accusations of anti-Semitism. Of course the non-Jewish people of the Middle East pay an immeasurably higher price.

2)
As a result, his grand redefinition of U.S. foreign policy is vulnerable to dilution or delay by upper-level officials who have the bureaucratic predisposition to favor caution over action and the familiar over the innovative. Some of them may even be unsympathetic to the president’s priorities regarding the Middle East and Iran.

I read this and think Dennis Ross. But Hillary Clinton herself and others in the Obama administration are far more strident in their inclination to put US resources at the disposal of the objective of securing Israel’s status as a Jewish majority state that can threaten but cannot be credibly threatened by its neighbors. It is really difficult to put responsibility for the Obama administration policies, or the failure of their implementation anywhere but on Obama himself.

3)
It is not fashionable to say this, but it is demonstrably true that — deservedly or not — much of the current hostility toward the United States in the Middle East and the Islamic world as a whole has been generated by the bloodshed and suffering produced by this prolonged conflict. Osama bin Laden’s self-serving justifications for 9/11 are a reminder that the United States itself is also a victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.

What an interesting statement by Brzezinski. Actually, this statement alone left me no choice but to write a blog post about Brzezinski’s article. Yes. Much of the current hostility against the US is generated directly or indirectly by the conflict over Zionism.

The first thing I want to look at is “deservedly or not”. This is a reflection back to Brzezinski’s premise that there must be a secure Jewish-majority state, so US actions to ensure the security of Israel do not deserve to create hostility, regardless of the misery those actions may cause. If you do not accept the premise that there must be a secure Jewish majority state, then the US has the option of not starving the people of Gaza, but instead of demanding Hamas to recognize Israel, demanding that they respect the rights of Jewish individuals, which Hamas likely would do. By Brzezinski’s view of the world, the US has no choice and does not deserve the hostility it has attracted. By the view of the world that is free from his false premise, the US has a choice and has deliberately decided to harm the non-Jewish people of the region.

If the question is deservedly or not, the answer is deservedly. Brzezinski is unable to see that, as are most of his colleagues in the US foreign policy establishment. But the people of the region are able to understand that. This divergence in perceptions threatens to become increasingly expensive for the United States.

Then I want to look at “It is not fashionable to say this”. How cute. No, it is not fashionable to say it at all. And it is not fashionable for a reason. The true statement that Israel imposes heavy costs on the United States often leads supporters of Israel to accuse the maker of that statement of anti-Jewish bigotry. This accusation of anti-Semitism is often false, but a false accusation of bigotry can still exact a psychic cost on its target. The avoidance in the background of potential false accusations of anti-Semitism has distorted US foreign policy in very basic and harmful ways.

Lastly and least important, Bin Laden is self serving only in the sense that the ideology for which he sacrificed a life of wealth and comfort is himself. But Brzezinski is correct that Bin Laden has stated clearly that 9/11 was in retaliation for acts the US commits in the name of protecting Israel. If the US had advocated a one state solution in the 1990s, the US would not have been the target of 9/11 if that attack happened at all and the huge expense of invading Afghanistan would have been avoided.

4)
First, Palestinian refugees should not be granted the right of return to what is now Israel, because Israel cannot be expected to commit suicide for the sake of peace. The refugees will have to be resettled within the Palestinian state, with compensation and maybe some expression of regret for their suffering. This will be very difficult for the Palestinian national movement to swallow, but there is no alternative.

There is an alternative. It is really an unexamined, false and very destructive premise that allows Brzezinski to believe there is not. Politically-White South Africa committed suicide for peace. The post World War II world has seen many examples of political entities committing suicide for peace.

“This will be very difficult for the Palestinian national movement to swallow”. Umm. Yes. And what if they do not? What if the Palestinians vote against this condition that Brzezinski admits would be very difficult to swallow? Then the US is justified in continuing to starve anyone in the region who does not accept Israel as a Jewish-majority state? Then if the US continues to pay billions in annual bribes to autocratic Arab dictators to repress their populations, any hostility that engenders will be undeserved?

This is an example of how Brzezinski’s premise that there must be a Jewish-majority state truly limits his ability to understand the people of the Middle East. It is as if there is a physical barrier preventing him from seeing past that question. The Palestinians just have to accept that there cannot be a right to return for people who aren’t Jewish. They just have to, and because of his premises, no further discussion is needed. These blinders systematically cause Western analysts to crash into unexpected behaviors of non-Jewish people in the region when they try to put their ideas in place in the real world.

5)
Third, a settlement must be based on the 1967 lines, but with territorial swaps that would allow the large settlements to be incorporated into Israel without any further reduction of the territory of the Palestinian state. That means some territorial compensation for Palestine from parts of northern and southern Israel that border the West Bank. It is important to remember that although the Israeli and Palestinian populations are almost equal in number, under the 1967 lines the Palestinian territories account for only 22 percent of the old British mandate, whereas the Israeli territories account for 78 percent.

It is interesting that Brzezinski knows that Jewish people have 78 percent of the territory for a smaller proportion of the population but is unable to draw what for every non-Jewish person in the region – whether Arab, Persian, Copt, Druze or whatever, whether Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian, atheist or whatever – is an obvious implication: that Zionism as applied in and before 1948 and as is maintained today is fundamentally an injustice that cannot be rectified in a way satisfactory to those Jewish people who would benefit from the injustice persisting, if those Jewish people have the option of just maintaining the injustice in place. Just another example of his unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish majority state.

6)
Fourth, the United States or NATO must make a commitment to station troops along the Jordan River. Such a move would reinforce Israel’s security with strategic depth. It would reduce Israel’s fears that an independent Palestine could some day serve as a springboard for a major Arab attack on Israel.

Wow. Now it is a testament to the pliancy of Mahmoud Abbas that this is even under discussion. But this is the first time I’m really examining the idea of US bases in Palestine to be held indefinitely regardless of the wishes of the people of Palestine. This is a move towards classical colonialism, the thing is that colonialism has been discredited not because of the recognition of the inherent value of man, but because it does not pay. The cost of these troops, if history is a guide, would vastly outweigh any benefit the US would get from having them there.

More generally, Brzezinski’s conception of the concessions the Palestinians would have to make for a two state solution are enough that they would not in the end be a solution at all. We’d be left with Palestinians told that they would starve if they do not vote for this arrangement – which alone would render the outcome illegitimate for many people in the region. But to ensure that the Palestinians are unable to continue to resist, Jordan still has to remain under its US-supported colonial rulers. Egypt has to continue under its dictator. When the Palestinians vote wrong, once again they’ll have to starve. The provocations against the non-Jewish people of the region would continue, and the impulse to respond would continue.

The costs the US would be required to expend for dealing with regional responses to Israel would continue to increase and this Jewish-majority Israel would still be threatened by other states in the region breaking its monopoly on the threat to use nuclear weapons. Brzezinski’s conception of a two state solution is not easy to distinguish from what we see today, so that even if it was to be reached, it would still be unfashionable but true to say that Jewish-majority Israel still deservedly creates costly-to-manage regional hostility against the US as its supporter.

7)
[On the subject of Iran]
Without quite saying so, he has basically downgraded the U.S. military option, although it is still fashionable to say that “all options remain on the table.” But the prospects for a successful negotiation are still quite uncertain.

Obama has not downgraded the option, but left it in the same position it occupied when he came into office. Bush late in his term continued to say all options remain on the table, but is widely known to have vetoed any military option. The fact of the matter is that by 2007, Iran had achieved, partly because of the US positions in Iraq and Afghanistan “escalation dominance” in which as hostilities ratchet up in plausible scenarios, the US would end up hurt enough that the US would regret the conflict as much or more than Iran.

I’m not sure why the US insists on saying publicly that there is a military option on the table, maybe it makes US politicians feel strong or virile. Nobody believes it anywhere, while saying it strengthens hard-liners in Iran.

8)
The United States has to be realistic when discussing this aspect, since the clock cannot be turned back: the Iranians have the capability to enrich uranium, and they are not going to give it up. But it is still possible, perhaps through a more intrusive inspection regime, to fashion a reasonably credible arrangement that prevents weaponization.

But while everyone knows Iran cannot be coerced or forced to give up enrichment, Barack Obama is not willing to say so. Iran will not commit to a more intrusive inspection regime before Obama commits to Iran enriching uranium. Where Obama is stuck is that to make the concession to reality that he cannot prevent Iran from becoming nuclear capable, he would have to take a position that could call into question his commitment to the security of Israel as a Jewish state. In the US foreign policy community, to lack a commitment to Israel’s security threatens to provoke the accusation of anti-Jewish bigotry.

We possibly will see sanctions against that harm the lives of Iranian people in tangible ways, that make it more difficult to find a job or that increase the rate of inflation throughout Iran’s economy and causing Iranians relying on their savings to do with less because Barack Obama would be made uncomfortable by false accusations of anti-Semitism. Brzezinski may believe that hostility that results from this is undeserved, or that the deservedness of such hostility is questionable. Few in Iran or the wider region would agree.

9)
Iran’s credibility was undermined by the convoluted manner in which Tehran complicated a promising compromise for a cooperative Iranian-Russian-French arrangement for processing its enriched uranium.

I think almost everyone in the US foreign policy community wrongly interprets what happened with this deal. The deal as presented – Iran shipping out almost all of its uranium at once instead of in pieces – is only beneficial to the West if the West does not intend to return fuel until Iran suspends enrichment. Otherwise, one batch or many lead to identical outcomes. Iran was not going to stop enrichment, so since the US would not relent on its insistence that there be one batch, the deal died. Brzezinski can think what he wants about Iranian credibility, but it was a bad deal.

10)
The position of Russia is ambiguous since as a major energy supplier to Europe, it stands to benefit financially from a prolonged crisis in the Persian Gulf that would prevent the entrance of Iranian oil into the European market. Indeed, from the Russian geopolitical perspective, a steep rise in the price of oil as a result of a conflict in the Persian Gulf would be most economically damaging to the United States and China — countries whose global preeminence Russia tends to resent and even fear — and would make Europe even more dependent on Russian energy.

This is a very interesting issue that I’ve thought about but never fully fleshed out. To the degree Russia and even China see themselves as rivals of the United States, watching the US sink resources into the Middle East, trying to pin down every non-Jewish person in the region while Russia and China get to position themselves as the good side must seem only partially bad. If the US was to make the mistake of allowing its hostility with Iran to escalate to full scale war, it could be good for Russia the way the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was good for the US and China.

It is difficult to figure out exactly what motivates Russia in this situation, but Russia may well quietly hope the US falls deeper in and remains engaged longer in the project of making the Middle East safe for Zionism in all of the forms this project takes. China’s motivations may be similar. If the US looks like it really would go to war, I’m not sure it could count on Russia or China to prevent it.

11)
Should the United States’ long-term goal be the evolution of Iran into a stabilizing power in the Middle East? To state the issue even more sharply and simply: Should its policy be designed to encourage Iran to eventually become a partner of the United States again — and even, as it was for three decades, of Israel?

This is a very important point. Westerners really have to stop this. The Shah’s foreign policy was not normal. The Shah’s foreign policy is not a model for modern Iran to emulate. The Shah was a pro-US stooge dictator who followed US commands because his rule depended on the US for legitimacy rather than the views of those he ruled. I often see the sentiment expressed that Iran has “historically” had good relations with Israel. Iran is a majority Muslim country. It’s good relations with Israel were very ahistorical. Presenting it as something to return to is an insult to the Iranian people.

To make the point again, one day Egypt will overthrow Mubarak and whoever else the US has propped up to replace him. When that happens, do not tell a democratic Egypt that since it had good relations with Israel under Mubarak, who depended on the US Congress allocating him an allowance, the democratic Egypt might have the same relations.

One day Palestine will have a leader who is able to win an election against organized opposition. When that happens, do not tell a democratically endorsed Palestinian leader that he should replicate the good relations with Israel that existed under Israel’s chosen puppet Abbas.

This should be common sense and I’m always stunned when I see this idea that Iran had good relations with Israel under the Shah presented as if that is meaningful. But for Brzezinski, with Brzezinski’s unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish state, it seems the Shah pursued a reasonable foreign policy while the Islamic Republic is mysteriously and unexplainably hostile to Israel. This premise is a real problem for his analysis.

12)
The Taliban are not a global revolutionary or terrorist movement, and although they are a broad alliance with a rather medieval vision of what Afghanistan ought to be, they do not directly threaten the West.

Good and not often mentioned point about the Taliban. The Taliban never hated the US and never had any interest in attacking the United States. But the Taliban did, accurately, see the US as engaging in a war against Muslims and allowed Bin Laden’s group to organize on its territory. Any Muslim controlled territory would do that, unless the US has some form of leverage.

What that means is that because the US supports Israel, it now has a national security objective in acquiring leverage over every Muslim-majority territory. It is a process that in itself creates more provocations against the Muslim world that create still more impulse for responses. This is a spiral that ends with the entire Muslim world colonial zed or the US unable to afford to continue. Bin Laden’s calculation in orchestrating the 9/11 attack is that it is more likely to end with the second.

13)
Additionally, the United States needs to develop a policy for gaining the support of Pakistan, not just in denying the Taliban a sanctuary in Pakistan but also in pressuring the Taliban in Afghanistan to accommodate. Given that many Pakistanis may prefer a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to a secular Afghanistan that leans toward Pakistan’s archrival, India, the United States needs to assuage Pakistan’s security concerns in order to gain its full cooperation in the campaign against the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban.

Pakistan is a case of another country that does not intrinsically hate the US, but that left to its own devices does not mind providing resources for parties that would punish the US and West for their attacks on the Muslim world. Bribing the corrupt leader Zardari to prosecute a war against the Taliban in which the people of Pakistan otherwise would not engage just continues the cycle.

14)
The consequences of a failed peace process in the Middle East, a military collision with Iran, and an intensifying military engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan all happening simultaneously could commit the United States for many years to a lonely and self-destructive conflict in a huge and volatile area. Eventually, that could spell the end of the United States’ current global preeminence.

This dramatic conclusion is true, except that what Brzezinski considers a successful peace process would, for the purposes he’s trying to achieve of ending the US war against Islam, still be a failed peace process. The US has to begin looking to the resolution in South Africa for an example of an outcome that treats every individual equally, allows a right to return regardless of ethnicity and does not require a spiraling cycle of increasingly emotive provocations and increasing responses between the US or the West and the Muslim world.

The US was in a position of relative power in 1945 that has never been seen before in history, and the US had the right to use that power as it saw fit. One way the US has been using its power is managing the project of keeping a region of over 200 million non-Jewish people unable to pose a threat to the political majority status of 5 million Jewish people in Palestine. Today the US has a far smaller margin of power over its rivals while the over 200 million people who have to be subjugated are growing more resourceful and capable. Those non-Jewish people of the region are also increasingly coming to understand the role the US plays and becoming more inclined to strike against the US directly.

The process by which the US is losing its position is certainly accelerated by the inability of its foreign policy establishment to question the necessity of a Jewish majority state in Palestine. There is a remaining question of will this process be arrested or will it continue to its conclusion. Arresting it sooner is better for the interests for the over 300 million US citizens as well as the hundreds of millions of people in Israel’s extended region. But this is a choice the US can only make for itself.

15)
[On US domestic problems that interfere with the formulation and application of good foreign policy]
The first is that foreign policy lobbies have become more influential in U.S. politics. Thanks to their access to Congress, a variety of lobbies — some financially well endowed, some backed by foreign interests — have been promoting, to an unprecedented degree, legislative intervention in foreign-policy making. Now more than ever, Congress not only actively opposes foreign policy decisions but even imposes some on the president. (The pending legislation on sanctions against Iran is but one example.) Such congressional intervention, promoted by lobbies, is a serious handicap in shaping a foreign policy meant to be responsive to the ever-changing realities of global politics and makes it more difficult to ensure that U.S. — not foreign — interests are the point of departure.

I have to say that I find lobbies, including the pro-Israel lobby that I sometimes see humorously described (with capitalization) as “The Lobby”, are over-estimated in their importance in distorting US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Of course, any argument that lobbies have no effect are wrong, but given Brzezinski’s premises, if he was put into power and every lobby dismantled, he would make the same mistakes Obama is making. In a long essay, Brzezinski makes a minor mention of lobbies, which is about right. The real problem is not the lobby, but the premises upon which foreign policy conclusions are generally constructed in the US.

16)
The resulting polarization not only makes a bipartisan foreign policy less likely, but it also encourages the infusion of demagogy into policy conflicts. And it poisons the public discourse. Still worse, personal vilification and hateful, as well as potentially violent, rhetoric are becoming widespread in that realm of political debate that is subject to neither fact checking nor libel laws: the blogosphere.

Hahaha.

Seriously though, there was once a far higher barrier preventing non-specialists from getting information about foreign policy. Specialists who become familiar with the Middle East for many reasons tend to be more stridently pro-Israel than the US lay population. In the terms of this essay, specialists accept the unexamined, false and destructive premise that there must be a Jewish-majority state in Palestine more uncritically than the vast majority of Americans who have never put much thought into the matter.

Here we have a situation where, if information can be spread quickly enough, non-specialists who are able to examine premises the specialists are blind to, just may be able to prevent the US from harming a lot more people while wasting a huge amount of resources and spiraling towards irrelevance.

17)
Last but not least, of the large democratic countries, the United States has one of the least informed publics when it comes to global affairs. Many Americans, as various National Geographic surveys have shown, are not even familiar with basic global geography. Their knowledge of other countries’ histories and cultures is not much better. How can a public unfamiliar with geography or foreign history have even an elementary grasp of, say, the geopolitical dilemmas that the United States faces in Afghanistan and Pakistan? With the accelerating decline in the circulation of newspapers and the trivialization of once genuinely informative television reporting, reliable and timely news about critical global issues is becoming less available to the general public. In that context, demagogically formulated solutions tend to become more appealing, especially in critical moments.

The insularity of Americans, which I guess comes from the historical lack of threats since the US is oceans away from its rivals, has allowed the US to develop in a naive and uninformed way. The oceans are becoming smaller though. US citizens are becoming more informed. I have not seen a poll, but I’d guess more Americans can identify every Middle East state, not only Iraq and Afghanistan – but Egypt, Saudi Arabia and more than could just ten years ago in 2000. The US will never be a country of foreign affairs students, but no country is. I think information has the potential to be a strong, not a weak point for the creation and application of US foreign policy in the future.

So what we’ve seen in Brzezinski’s essay is that in defense of Obama’s policy he shows the failures of analysis that he shares with Obama and most of the US foreign policy establishment. On the other hand, he is unusually candid about the challenges the US faces, even if as of today, he would not be prepared to meet those challenges.

3 comments:

Lysander said…

Thanks, Arnold. That was very good reading.

What are your thoughts on Iran’s counter ultimatum? That is, accept our version of the swap by end of January or we will make our own uranium. It was announced in a press conference by the Foreign Minister so it sounds like they really mean it.

“the way the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was good for the US and China”

You are right, I only have to add that Russia has NOT organised trap for USA in the ME (unlike Brzezinski’s trap for USSR in Afghanistan). USA did it all single-handed (and by trapping USSR in Afghanistan as well)

From Publishers Weekly

Put the Tom Clancy clones back on the shelf; this covert-ops chronicle is practically impossible to put down. No thriller writer would dare invent Wilson, a six-feet-four-inch Texas congressman,liberal on social issues but rabidly anti-Communist, a boozer, engaged in serial affairs and wheeler-dealer of consummate skill. Only slightly less improbable is Gust Avrakotos, a blue-collar Greek immigrant who joined the CIA when it was an Ivy League preserve and fought his elitist colleagues almost as ruthlessly as he fought the Soviet Union in the Cold War’s waning years. In conjunction with President Zia of Pakistan in the 1980s, Wilson and Arvakotos circumvented most of the barriers to arming the Afghan mujahideen-distance, money, law and internal CIA politics, to name a few. Their coups included getting Israeli-modified Chinese weapons smuggled into Afghanistan, with the Pakistanis turning a blind eye,and the cultivation of a genius-level weapons designer and strategist named Michael Vickers, a key architect of the guerrilla campaign that left the Soviet army stymied. The ultimate weapon in Afghanistan was the portable Stinger anti-aircraft missile, which eliminated the Soviet’s Mi-24 helicopter gunships and began the train of events leading to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites. A triumph of ruthless ability over scruples, this story has dominated recent history in the form of blowback: many of the men armed by the CIA became the Taliban’s murderous enforcers and Osama bin Laden’s protectors. Yet superb writing from Crile, a 60 Minutes producer, will keep even the most vigorous critics of this Contra-like affair reading to the end.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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